Many forms of display devices for dispensing items have been developed. The display devices are structured in a way dependent upon the type of units to be displayed and released. For example, a very early form of display cabinet is of the type shown in U.S. Pat. No. 1,706,240. In that system, lids may be lifted upwardly when released to permit withdrawal of contents from within the display cabinet. With this arrangement, users can extract from the display cabinet as much material as they wish. A similar concept has been applied to sheet material which may be in the form of brochures and other types of advertising material, discount coupons and the like. Dispensers for large sheet material may be of the type such as shown in U.S. Pat. Nos. 1,739,801 and 4,130,197. In these devices, the sheets as presented in the holder may be readily extracted by the user. There is no limit however on the number of sheets which may be extracted from the unit. In the area of discount coupons, holders such as those shown in U.S. Pat. No. 3,881,649 may be used. The holders are adapted to be readily attached to store shelves to present coupons which may be removed by the user for redemption at the check-out counter. However, the user may remove as many coupons as they desire. An attempt to reduce the number of coupons that may be removed from a dispenser is contemplated in U.S. Pat. No. 3,147,856. In thwarting access to the coupons it becomes very difficult to even remove one coupon at a time from the unit.
Other types of one-at-a-time dispensers are disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,068,055 and Canadian Industrial Design Registration No. 54860. The United States patent discloses a household napkin holder and dispenser which provides for removal of one serviette at a time from the holder. Due to the flimsy nature of the serviettes, jamming can occur at the removal slot of the holder. A similar problem can be encountered with the discount coupon dispenser of the industrial design registration.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,381,851 issued May 7, 1968 to Ferris et al discloses an arcuate strip dispenser with a large central opening for insertion of the fingers and removal of a strip. The large opening makes it easy to insert a finger over an edge of a stack of strips and remove several strips at one time. Moreover, only a limited number of strips in a stack can be accommodated as there is no means for biasing the stack against the front wall.
Swiss Patentschrift No. 186224 published Nov. 16, 1936 by Hug discloses a dispenser with a cruciform shaped opening centrally in the front wall and a solid sheet spring bent at the center with two concave faces each extending back to contact the back wall proximate respective ends of the enclosure. Total movement of the spring is limited by the movement allowed at the ends. Too much spacing between the ends of the spring and side walls of the enclosure can result in misalignment of the spring and jamming of the sheets. Moreover, since the front wall does not conform to the shape of the stack as determined in this case by the spring, the ends of the sheets in the stack will not be held together when the thickness of the stack is reduced to the point where the front sheet does not contact the front wall. At that point it will be possible to extract more than one sheet.
Accordingly this invention provides a one-at-a-time sheet dispenser. The sheets to be dispensed are normally of a single sheet thickness and of varying dimensions. The preferred type of sheets to be dispensed are the discount coupons which are normally of a dollar bill size.
The invention provides a dispenser which ensures that a single sheet is removed from the dispenser one at a time to thwart any effort by the user to take several sheets at a time.